Unearthing the Royal Kurgan

February, 1837 – Kerch Crimea. After several years of exhaustive excavation trying find a way inside the giant earthen mound, archaeologist Anton Ashik & his weary team of explorers finally open the hidden entrance to one of the greatest megalithic marvels ever discovered between Europe & Asia – what has come to be known as the Royal Kurgan.

As light pierced through the dank darkness, what Anton saw next probably left him utterly speechless. He would later describe this once in a lifetime experience as follows… “Huge walls formed the entrance to the tomb… the mound consists of a tomb and a long corridor made of rusticated slabs. The burial chamber is built on a rock. In plan it is almost square. The walls consist of 10 rows of masonry; at the level of the 5th row, they gradually turn into a stepped-circular dome. The chamber height is almost 9 m…”

Kurgan is a Russian word that means burial mound, & this mound stands almost 65 feet high! Many layers of clay, algae and rubble stones cover the inner structure beneath & protect it from erosion by atmospheric precipitation. The entrance is located on the south-side of the mound & the stonework is made of limestone.

In 1856 a Swiss Artist named Carlo Bossoli visited the Royal Kurgan & painted his experience. As you can see, Carlo was seated deep inside the far end of the mound in what is called the tomb & was painting the view he saw looking out towards the southward entrance… Notice the precision mortarless architecture, the long corridor made of rusticated slabs & how it gradually merges into the circular shaped corbelled dome.

Archaeologist Anton Ashick also wrote “If you look back from the chamber of the tomb, you will find that the exit appears to be much further than the distance to the tomb outside. This effect was achieved by the unequal width and non-parallelism of the walls of the dromos. It is likely that the ancient Greeks sought to achieve this effect on purpose: the path to the afterlife is close, but the way out of it seems so far.”

Now Anton obviously assumed, based on this testimony, that the ancient Greeks built this structure. This is most likely due to the fact that Kerch was founded approx 2,600 years ago as an ancient Greek colony. Yet Kerch is considered to be one of the most ancient cities in Crimea, & archeological digs near the city have ascertained that the area had been inhabited as far back as the 17th centuries B.C.

Q Mainstream academia assumes that the Royal Kurgan was the final resting place of a ruler of the Bosporan Kingdom somewhere between 400-300 B.C…. or… is it much much older?

Q Is it the massive size of the Royal Kurgan that prompted archaeologists to conclude that this structure was built by & for a king, hence naming it as such in the first place?

Anton Ashik made no mention & I have found no record that a sarcophagi or skeletons were found during his excavation of 1837.

Q Was this mound completely plundered in antiquity?

At the beginning of the 19th century, there were apparently more than two thousand mounds dotting the Kerch Peninsula, but sadly today most of them have all but disappeared. Estimated to be as old or older than the Royal Kurgan, almost all of these other burial mounds appear inferior in their construction methods as they use only wood, rocks & mud, not precision mortarless architecture as seen with the Royal Kurgan.

Q Why is the Royal Kurgan mound so spectacularly different from the other mounds of the region?

Some might be quick to answer that these other burial mounds must have been made for the commoners of that day, but this is not the case, as these other mounds are thought by mainstream academia to be the tombs of Scythian royalty who ruled the plains of the region 3,000 years ago. Inside these other Kurgans have been found vast amounts of pure gold objects depicting primal battles between monsters & animals. Many of the mummies unearthed inside were covered in tattoos & clearly members of a ruling class.

Q Are these other Kurgans the Scythian’s best attempt to emulate the splendor of the Royal Kurgan, similar to what we see in Peru – where the small rough stone/ clay mortar construction style is built around the superior precision mortarless architecture that seems to predate it?

Some of the components of the Royal Kurgan look eerily similar to that of the Grand Gallery of the Great Pyramid… or the subterranean well of Santa Cristina in Sardinia…

Archaeologist Anton Ashik made the intriguing comment that “All blocks of the crypt and dromos were laid dry, without binder. In many places, traces of the instrument have been preserved on the walls – small rectangular grooves in the walls…”

Q Is Anton describing here the traces left behind from some form of lost technology that the ancient architects were using to build this megalithic masterpiece?

Something else to mention here is that all over this region of the black sea have been found ancient skeletons possessing strange elongated skulls very similar to those seen in places such as Paracas, Peru. Many of these skulls seem to possess approx 25% more cranial mass than normal human skulls… Now cradle head boarding can altar the shape of a skull, but it cannot produce more cranial mass as these appear to have… Elongated skulls such as these have been found near the area of the Royal Kurgan in locations such as Arkaim, Omsk, Pyatigorsk, Kislovodsk & Yakovenkovo

Q Is there a connection between these ancient elongated skull people or humanoids and the precision megalith known as the Royal Kurgan? Could the Royal Kurgan have been built as the final resting for one of these humanoids?

So many questions, yet a few things are for certain. The Royal Kurgan is an ancient architectural masterpiece that holds many secrets & we are very lucky that it is still standing.

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